Tech News
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Gigabyte Radeon HD 7870 2GB OC Graphics Card Review @ APH Networks
Published: Monday, July 16, 2012 | By: DennisWe love us some hot Gigabyte action!! This time featuring the Radeon HD 7870 GPU and triple fan Windforce cooler. Yes, the same one featured on the GTX 670 OC video card I reviewed.
APH Networks reviews Gigabyte's interpretation of the 7870. Does the company's classic formula of using a great cooler, good electronic components, and a slight overclock set a standard for excellence again? Read on to find out!
Only a slight overclock? WTH!?!
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Sapphire HD 7970 6GB Toxic Edition Review @ Kitguru
Published: Monday, July 16, 2012 | By: DennisThis looks like a halfway decent card and with 6GB of video ram to boot.
Last week we had some hands on time with the latest AMD GHZ HD7970. At the end of the day it left us feeling distinctly uninspired. There was no doubt the card was fast, but AMD sadly adopted their ill equipped, painfully loud cooling solution with tiny, single red fan.
We hoped that Sapphire would rectify the sorry state of affairs and today we have their latest HD7970 ‘Toxic Edition’ in our labs, featuring a proprietary dual fan cooler, a staggering 6GB of GDDR5 and a ground breaking ‘lethal boost’ overclock core speed of 1,200mhz.The cooler is a custom design with dual fans that cool the GPU and memory. Small heatsinks cover the PWM mosfets and are cooled with blowby air from the primary radiator. Those of you familiar with the Asus ROG GPUs will recognize the basic design.
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An Army of Gigabyte Sniper Reviews
Published: Friday, July 13, 2012 | By: DennisOne of the newest gaming motherboards to hit the enthusiast sector is the Gigabyte G1.Killer line complete with a military color theme and pirate skull beret wearing hat logo guy.
Gigabyte G1.Sniper M3 Intel Z77 Express @ techPowerUp
Gigabyte's first G1.Killer Intel Z77 Express product takes a completely new slant on enthusiast gaming products, shrinking down to a mATX form factor, as was widely requested by end users. The G1.Sniper M3 is a gaming soldier that's ready for battle, equipped with some of the latest and greatest technology, including a Creative Recon3Di audio CODEC, and Intel LAN controller that supports CFOS traffic shaping technology.
Gigabyte G1.Sniper M3 @ Techreaction.netWe are going to take this one in another direction (perhaps a little in reverse with a bit of the end at the beginning). At first glance, this board does not seem to be worth the money and we want to clear the air a little about what most people may not (do not) need.
GIGABYTE G1.Sniper 3 Motherboard @ Bjorn3DGIGABYTE now has a second entry into the G1.Killer series for the Z77 lineup. Needless to say, when we look at a gaming board, we expect the appearance to scare the competition away, and the power to back it up. Does the G1.Sniper 3 deliver? Let’s take a look.
We have the full sized Sniper 3 in the Lab and so far it looks pretty darn good.
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NL: Review Block - Video Cards and Even More Video Cards
Published: Friday, July 13, 2012 | By: DennisJust look what happens when I let the news box go for a few days. Yep that's right, way to many video card reviews to handle in one sitting. As you can tell from the list there were quiite a few GTX 670 and GTX 680 cards released along with a few custom AMD Radeon cards.
Video Card Goodness
- Zotac GTX 670 AMP! Review @ XSReviews.co.uk
- MSI GTX 670 Power Edition OC (Twin Frozr IV) Review
- HIS Radeon HD 7950 ICEQ Turbo review
- ASUS GTX 670 DirectCu II TOP Review @ Hardware Canucks
- MSI GeForce GTX 670 Power edition OC review
- ASUS GTX 680 DirectCU II TOP Review @ Hardware Canucks
- MSI GTX 670 Power Edition Twin Frozr IV 2 GB @ techPowerUp
- Sapphire HD 7950 FleX Edition @ TechwareLabs
- Sapphire HD 7870 FLeX @ LanOC Reviews
- Sapphire Radeon 7870 FleX @ PureOverclock
- Gainward GeForce GTX 670 Phantom 2GB Review @ NikKTech
- MSI GeForce GTX 680 Lightning 2 GB @ techPowerUp
- MSI GeForce GTX 680 Lightning review
GPU Coolers
- Gelid Icy Vision-A GPU Cooler Review at HardwareHeavenWe don't have any more Video cards in the review "hoppa" but am planning to get a few in before the end of the month.
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Crucial Ballistix Elite 2x4GB DDR3-1866 MHz CL9 @ ocaholic
Published: Friday, July 13, 2012 | By: DennisCrucial is an old school company that still manages to poop out a few new products now and again. Keep in mind this is a local company (to me) and often the target when I go off ranting about sample support but sadly that won't happen this time. The modules in this review are somewhat lackluster in their timings and speed so really not an interest to the overclocker.
Those who have been around in the Socket 775 era might remember a brand named Crucial. Being in a very close business relationship with Micron, the maker behind the legendary D9GMH and D9GTR chips, has enabled Crucial to launch the Ballistix series, which instantly became an overclocking hit. In the following chip generations, Micron have failed to repeat their success, which meant that Crucial memory division have mostly been flying under the radar. But now, judging by the new outburst of Ballistix on the market, it seems that Micron might have again come up with something interesting.
Maybe Crucial will get back into the enthusiast game and show off their awesome binning skills or simply continue on and keep us guessing and hoping for more. I guess it might be time to go knock on the door and get some solid answers.
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Custom NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670/680 Round Up: EVGA, ZOTAC, MSI, Gigabyte, ASUS
Published: Thursday, July 12, 2012 | By: DennisI do like me a custom PCB and Hot Hardware has a grip of them on display.
Now that Kepler has had a few months to marinate, NVIDIA’s board partners are ready with newer, custom GeForce GTX 680 and GTX 670 cards that push things a bit further than the initial batch of products based on NVIDIA’s reference designs. As such, we thought it would be a great time to round-up some of the hottest offerings to see how they compare to each other and to AMD’s latest, the Radeon HD 7970 GHz Edition, which hit the scene recently.
We’ve got six cards on tap for you today, four GeForce GTX 680 and two GeForce GTX 670 cards, from companies like MSI, Asus, EVGA, ZOTAC, and Gigabyte...There is a review of the Gigabyte GTX 670 on Ninjalane already and is almost identical to the Gigabyte card featured in this article. I'm not a fan of their overclocking results but I am impressed to see that all of the cards were within a few frames of each other and of course the card that clocked the highest also netted the best score.
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Mozilla Likely to Stop Development on Thunderbird
Published: Wednesday, July 11, 2012 | By: DennisThis seems sudden but based on a leaked email from the top brass at Mozilla it would appear that internal development of the popular email client, Thunderbird will stop. Of course this saddens me because I am a loyal Thunderbird user but, I can understand the reasons behind the decision.
Just a month after the release of the latest version 13 of Thunderbird, however, a leaked email on Friday apparently forced Mozilla to admit that it's putting the brakes on internal Thunderbird development.
"Once again we've been asking the question: is Thunderbird a likely source of innovation and of leadership in today's Internet life? Or is Thunderbird already pretty much what its users want and mostly needs some on-going maintenance?" wrote Mitchell Baker, chair of the Mozilla Foundation, in a blog post on Friday.Thing is I've been running an older version of Thunderbird for years and thus far have been turned off of the newer editions due to the lackluster UI changes. The fact of the matter is, I like my email a certain way and when they change things I get all Hulk up in here and ragequit an email to Mozilla and complain.
Of course my actions do nothing but fuels the fires and reinforce the reasons behind the stop in development. It makes me feel better at least
With any luck Thunderbird will continue to run on future versions of Windows or maybe another group will pick up the project. Only the Mayans know the truth.
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Four ways the Internet could go down - Lets Speculate
Published: Tuesday, July 10, 2012 | By: DennisIn the uncertain world we live in we often wonder what would happen if "X" was removed from the equation. For instance what would you do if you didn't have a cell phone? I know what I would do, heck there was a good portion of my life lived during those times and it wasn't all that bad. Of course there was a think called a "Pay Phone" which has since been removed from street corners and bowling alleys across the country.
Another technology that we have taken for granted is the Internet, it brings endless hours of entertainment to us and is the lifeblood of companies and small nations across the globe. The Internet is designed to be robust and redundant with very little chance of going down, short of some major event such as the ones in this article.
The fact that the Web has not stopped functioning in its initial decades sometimes encourages us to assume that it never will. But like any system, biological or man-made, the Internet has the potential to fail.
The third scenario discussed is most likely what will cause worldwide failures and in the event of world war it will be one of the first things to go in an attempt to protect domestic communications and prevent other countries from using it against us.
I do like the last comment in this article, it sounds so "high school" - Read on
I propose that we need to have a similar backup security plan for the human knowledge that underlies the Internet.
I'm not suggesting something like the Way Back Machine, which takes snapshots of websites through time. I'm instead talking about simple instructions, burned onto physical media, for how to generate electricity, how to build a computer, how to build a router and how to reconstitute the Internet from basic principles.I could be wrong but I think he is talking about something we call a Book
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OCZ RevoDrive X2 SSD Review @ HardwareLOOK
Published: Tuesday, July 10, 2012 | By: Dennis240GB SSD!! What have you done with my Flash memory and where do I go to complain! SSDs are supposed to be small and expensive not Fast, Cheap(ish) and Large.
The OCZ RevoDrive X2 is one of the fasted SSD's on the market, and you can see why in its vastly dominating performance results, even against some of the newest SSD's from the top brands hosting the new SSD controllers and firmware. let's take a look at these gob smacking super fast results...
For those who don't know the RevoDrive is a PCI Express hard card that usually consists of two or more SSD drives in RAID to both increase speed and capacity.
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Windows 8 Upgrade Deals May Not Work Out Well for Microsoft
Published: Monday, July 9, 2012 | By: DennisEarly this month Microsoft announced that you could buy an upgrade to Windows 8 for $40US making it one of the cheapest OS's you can buy from Microsoft. But will this come back and byte Microsoft?? Will this be enough to offset the "phj34r of change" associated with Metro and the lack of a traditional desktop??
As a hardware enthusiast I don't think it will be enough. Sadly when it comes to software sales the majority speaks and the Majority in this case are *NOT* hardware enthusiasts.
"Being forced by their employers to work on Windows XP has been driving people toward Macs and tablets," Johnson said. "Microsoft's future viability depends on how fast it can get new value in the hands of users. A high cost of upgrading has been slowing them down."
However, the upgrade incentives can be a double-edged sword, because touchscreens, touchpads and mice that support gestures are important to providing a good experience with Windows 8, according to Michael Silver, a Gartner analyst.
"Most PCs that will really make Windows 8 work well won't ship until the OS does. People upgrading older PCs is actually a risk for Microsoft because they may not be as happy as users that have new PCs tuned for Windows 8," Silver said. "Users that upgrade should ensure they have either a touchscreen or a touchpad or touch mouse that supports gestures in Windows 8."I still don't see how the Metro interface will work in business, for the home user its golden but in the office environment workstations are dominated by keyboards I just don't see people flicking a screen and then moving back to the keyboard to finish their document. On the same token I don't see artists using a touch screen to photos or do anything to create images, you need a little more control than that and fat human fingers are not going to cut it.
